I’ve mentioned before that I am currently managing a reconstruction of my employer’s corporate website. One of the new, “Web 2.0” type thingies we’ve decided to include is a corporate blog, not because we want the site to be trendy, but because it will give us a key advantage over our competitors. We will now have the ability to interact, in a very public way, with our clients, our potential clients, our industry peers, and our future coworkers.

Our desire to make this interaction public, to take it off the private phone lines and bring it out onto the open network of the Internet, is not a cynical attempt to hijack the revolution of blogging for marketing purposes the way many companies have co-opted the counterculture for their own purposes. Though we think it will certainly help the effort, our desire to start a corporate blog is not neccessarily tied into our desire to do better financially. Rather, it is a demonstration of our desire to do better morally.

Many of my coworkers want to know the difference between “corporate” blogging and “regular” blogging. My answer is that there is none. The essence of blogging, as I know it, is authenticity. This essence is the reason why the story of lonelygirl15 was so newsworthy.

Lonelygirl15 was the blogger who had her videos watched over 24-million times on YouTube. Contrary to her audience’s expectations, however, she subverted the essence of blogging by using the form to tell a fictional story. Her audience misunderstood because the essence of the form itself caused them to expect authenticity. When the ruse was discovered and the creators of lonelygirl15 made clear their intention to continue the story despite the audience’s newfound awareness of the fictional nature of the videos, they effectively stopped subverting the form and, instead, expanded it to include its potential for fictional narratives. The ability to tell fictional tales, however, does not radically alter the form’s essence of authenticity; rather, it develops for it a sense irony.

While my answer suggests that there is no essential difference between “corporate” blogging and “regular” blogging, it does not preclude us separating the two at a more superficial level.The very notion of preceeding the word “blogging” with an adjective allows the essential form to exist (only) in diverse forms. I’m about to go off on a whole Platonic rant, however, so let’s leave the concept of the form alone and move to the real question that my coworkers want to ask. They don’t want to know the difference between corporate and regular blogging; rather, they want to know how one blogs on a corporate website.

Due to the essence of the form, however, the answer is simple: the way one blogs is authentically. My coworkers’ concern about it being a “corporate” blog as opposed to a “regular” blog is, I think, unjustified. The only limit given to a corporate blogger is the limit of “topic,” but most of the bloggers who are trying to be more than a invisible dot in the darkness limit themselves to a specific topic, so even in that, corporate blogging has no real difference from the majority of what passes for blogging. Of course, a corporate blogger might be limited by the bosses’ social tastes, but the absence of swear words or political/spiritual speech need not effect one’s sense of authenticity (the only thing required by authenticity is a strong sense of morality, and if one’s bosses object to one’s sense of morality, then I suggest one stop working for them).

Blogging’s intimate connection to morality is why I said that our desire to create a corporate blog is a demonstration of our desire to do better. By bringing ourselves into the light of the greater community, by subjecting ourselves — our conversations with our clients, our sales process, our internal culture — to the judgement of the community, we attempt to become better than we could be if we were left all alone. Part of my company’s value to our clients is that, like Socrates, we understand that wisdom is knowing one does not know. By taking up a corporate blog, you might say that our company will demonstrate our expertise by also demonstrating our ignorance.

But in blogging, we do not just hope to demonstrate, we hope to become, and this is something my coworkers must know.

To go back to the form of blogging for a moment, we have described it as the form of authenticity. Let’s give this form some dimensions, shall we? In the first dimension, we have the single word in a blog post. This is the blog’s dot, so to speak. This word connects to another word, and this connection brings in the concept of the line, the second dimension. You can imagine this dimension as the flat screen of your monitor. You read left to right. You scroll from top to bottom. Left-right, up-down: all single lines working on the same two-dimensional plane. The story of lonelygirl15 gives us our third dimension, which takes our perception “behind” the screen to seek out the (possibly, ironically, inauthentic) intentions of the person who created the blog post. But there is a fourth dimension to our form, one best demonstrated by the two “stylistic requirements” for blogs: the commenting function and the way the most recent post is always at the top; these show the form’s dimension of time.

For those who may not know, blog readers have the ability to leave a comment after they have read a given post and most bloggers will respond to these comments. A reader who comes along later, then, reads not only the original post, which gives the reader one experience with the blogger, but also the blogger’s later response, which gives the reader a second experience with the blogger, one that shows how the blogger interacts with others. These two experiences stretch the reader’s perception of the blogger, revealing more authenticity than what one might get from just reading the single, original post. It is this ability to witness the blogger across time that seperates a blog post from a traditional article. In the translator’s introduction to Levinas’ Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, Alphonsa Lingis writes, “authenticity…is defined by answerability.” The commenting function of blogging introduces the blogger to answerability and helps to create the blog’s essential authenticity.

For those readers who do not venture into the realm of a blog’s comments, however, there is still the fourth dimension of time to be found in the way a blog is stylistically defined as having more than one post on the front page, with the most recent on top. This gives a reader the ability to read the same blogger writing at different times. One can then compare and contrast the differences and witness how a blogger grows and in what way. The blogger now becomes answerable to a reader’s tastes in people in general, as opposed to, say, a generic newspaper reporter, who writes in such anonymous fashion as to erase any sense of humanity, and thus, writes beyond the judgement of taste. By demonstrating — right on the front page — what one thinks today, despite what one thought yesterday, the blogger allows the reader to judge the blog’s authenticity.

But my coworkers don’t care about the philosophy and stylistics of blogging. So what they really need to know is this: The desire to do better will best be fulfilled by actively engaging one’s audience. This is not the same thing as being smart or being funny; rather, this is the action of interacting. It is blogging to the audience personally, as if they are standing in front of you and have the opportunity to respond to whatever you say, because in truth, they do.

Here’s the key it, though. The real secret to the whole thing. Are you ready for it?

The commenter’s ability to respond is not necessarily adversarial. If you don’t approach your readers combatively, then they won’t approach you that way. It would be the equivalent of yelling at a stranger because he said “Hello” and gave you a smile. Sure, some people are going to do that once in a while, if only because there are a lot of dicks in the world, but the people that you want to talk to, the people you want to engage, they’re going to repay kindness with kindness.

It’s this positive side of human nature that makes blogging so wonderful, and what will help any corporation that goes about blogging authentically. If one confesses to one’s ignorance, then those who know will help. And if one is able to help those who are ignorant, one demonstrates one’s wisdom.